“I don’t think she died from drugs,” the 49-year-old singer told Rolling Stone in a new interview. “No, not at all. She was really working hard on herself to try to be a sober person and, um [pauses] she was a great woman.”

After Houston was discovered unresponsive in a hotel bathtub in 2012, a coroner’s report determined that her “death was complicated by chronic cocaine use and heart disease,” having detected cocaine, marijuana, Xanax, Benadryl and other medication in her system. While Brown indicated that he believes she did not have drugs in her system, his wife and manager, Alicia Etheridge-Brown, stopped him to say, “There were drugs in her system.”

About three years after Houston’s death, Brown suffered another loss when their daughter, Kristina Bobbi Brown, was also found unconscious in a bathtub. She remained in a coma for six months before passing away that June at the age of 22. Her boyfriend Nick Gordon was found liable for her wrongful death in September 2016 and was ordered to pay $36 million to her estate — something her father doesn’t see as justice.